Internet Archive hacked, millions of records stolen following DDoS attack
Breach reportedly affects 31 million Internet Archive users
· TechRadarNews By Ellen Jennings-Trace published 10 October 2024
The Internet Archive has been hit by a cyberattack which has affected the data of over 31 million people.
Visitors to the digital library site were met with a pop-up saying, “Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!”
HIBP refers to ‘Have I Been Pwned?’, a site where users can check if their information has been compromised in any data breaches. HIBP operator Troy Hunt confirmed receiving a file containing the ‘screen names, email addresses, Bcrypt-hashed passwords, and other internal data’ for 31 million unique email addresses.
A valuable service
The Internet Archive has reportedly faced a string of Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) which have halted services in recent months.
It isn’t particularly clear what the exact motives for this attack were, in fact, software curator and archivist at The Internet Archive, Jason Scott commented, “According to their twitter, they’re doing it just to do it. Just because they can. No statement, no idea, no demands.”
However, X (formerly Twitter) account Sn_darkmeta have claimed responsibility for the breach, and its reasonings for the attack is, “Because the archive belongs to the USA, and as we all know, this horrendous and hypocritical government supports the genocide that is being carried out by the terrorist state of “Israel”.
For clarity, the IA is not known to have any ties to Israel and is not a US government organization, but rather a nonprofit archive, which advocates for a free and open internet. On top of the cyberattacks, the IA is facing legal challenges in regards to copyrighted materials from book publishers and music labels.
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